Review: Doctor Who The Well is a Master of Tension that Lives Up to its Predecessor

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If there is one episode of Doctor Who I never wanted to see a sequel to, it’s Midnight. That story about an unseeable, unknowable monster that completely and thoroughly beat the Doctor and terrified them more than anything they’d ever known – a story about how unrestrained, unquenchable fear can turn even the best of us into the worst people – is simply perfect. You can’t top perfection, so don’t even try. It’s horror movie sequel syndrome, the Weeping Angels all over again; learning more about the monster kills everything that’s special about it, so just don’t bother.

And yet…I think The Well nails it.

We learn just the tiniest amount more about the monster, just about what it does, not about what it is, and that’s the crucial difference. That’s how you keep a monster terrifying. We now know that it kills anyone who tries to perceive it and has seemingly unlimited strength when doing so, yet we still don’t know how or why, and that keeps it scary.

I applaud the visual work here. There is one shot where it shifts in the shadow that I could’ve done without, but aside from that, it is masterful VFX work where we see something move, just out of focus, just behind the characters, for barely two frames of screen-time. It puts us in that terrifying uncertain mindset of the characters, where they’re not even sure they saw anything at all, and yet they can’t shake the feeling that something is there.

The episode revels in this feeling, and it’s glorious. I had seen rumours going around that this episode might be about the Midnight Entity, but I didn’t know for sure and that feeling enhanced the experience for me as I tried to pick up on every clue I could to work out if this was what I thought it was or something different. In an amazing twist, that put me in the shoes of the Doctor, who spent the first half of the episode slowly putting the pieces together.

It barely needs to be said at this point in his run, but what an actor Ncuti Gatwa is. From the word go, you can see this glimmer of dread in his eyes, this sense that he desperately hopes he’s wrong – that he’s not about to re-encounter the one foe that truly terrified him. It takes just over half the runtime for the Doctor to realize he’s on Midnight, and yet it flies by as I was thoroughly gripped by the creeping build to the creature’s first kill.

The human dynamic isn’t forgotten either. Such a huge part of what makes Midnight so brilliant is that we get to see what the fear of this unknowable entity does to the ordinary people who are trapped in a room with it. This isn’t as big of a focus in The Well, we still get a great taste of it, as the disciplined military man who always follows The Rules™ slowly acts more and more irrationally as the fear warps his mind at the cost of many lives, including his own.

The other big thing that keeps the mystique of the monster is that The Doctor doesn’t beat it this time, either. We get our triumphant moment where he finally gets one up on it, but he still can’t win. The moment was set up perfectly, too. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to put “it broke all the mirrors” and “we’re in a mercury mine” together, and yet it waits just long enough that you let it slip your mind until the moment the Doctor floods the room the mercury to force the creature to perceive its own reflection.

Yet that triumphant moment can’t stand. Even though perceiving it has been instant death for anything we’ve seen up until this point, this entity somehow survives, and we’re dragged right back into the tragedy, partly because the Doctor just can’t stand not knowing what this thing is. I must once again complement Ncuti’s performance, as you see on his face how deeply his encounter with the Midnight Entity scarred him before, and how it means he can’t stop himself from trying to know what this thing is, as I’m sure many people watching do too.

Then, for the second time, the Doctor only survives an encounter with it because someone sacrifices themselves on his behalf. Then it caps things off in the perfect horror movie-esque way, teasing us with the idea that maybe we made the wrong assumption about who the entity latched onto, and maybe it did get away with the crew like it wanted. Like last time, I like not knowing, and I hope we never find out.

I am ecstatic that The Well is as great an episode as it is. Living up to what I believe to be the greatest Doctor Who episode of all time is no small task, but it captures all the things that made Midnight great and gives us hints of the entity’s lore without giving us so much as to ruin the mystique.

Is it as good as Midnight? No, but it comes about as close as a sequel ever could, making for a fantastic duology of episodes, and that is an astounding achievement.

Now, Russell, that’s it. You did one sequel and you got away with it. No more.